27 February 2012

Review: Faking Faith

The concept behind this book is great - a girl gets caught up in a sexting scandal at school, and falls into the online world of homeschooled evangelical teenagers to the point of actually starting a blog of her own, faking her way in the evangelical world as "Faith." She becomes friendly with another girl and actually goes to visit her and live among those she has merely been pretending to be.

Like I said, great concept. Sadly, the execution is less than stellar. It handles a difficult, often foreign group of people very poorly - more as satirical curiosities than actual human beings. It has its moments of respectfulness and interest, but it's far overshadowed by what I felt was more of a "hey, look at this freak show" element, as if it was fairly known that the antagonists of the story would never get ahold of it in the real world.

There are a lot of books that handle religion - and moving away from/questioning religion - very well, and tons that do this much better. There are ways to satirize belief and belief systems in respectful manners. This book doesn't do either of them well, and to its overall detriment.